26 September 2016
In September 2015 Profile and Serpent’s Tail decided to change our policy on unsolicited material. Rather than sending an automatic, form email or letter saying ‘we only accept queries from agents; thank you, but no thank you’, we started reading and evaluating those submissions instead.
We look at everything that comes in though our submissions account ([email protected]) unless it doesn’t meet our submission guidelines. Our response time depends on a number of factors, and right now it’s around 6-8 weeks.
One factor that can affect how quickly we respond is the number of other submissions received in that month. Below is a breakdown of our month by month submission totals over the last 13 months:
|
September 2015 |
46 |
|
October 2015 |
67 |
|
November 2015 |
63 |
|
December 2015 |
30 |
|
January 2016 |
95 |
|
February 2016 |
88 |
|
March 2016 |
59 |
|
April 2016 |
72 |
|
May 2016 |
98 |
|
June 2016 |
63 |
|
July 2016 |
83 |
|
August 2016 |
82 |
|
September 2016 (to date) |
68 |
One year after our change in policy we have received around 870 unsolicited submissions. 85% of all submissions are fiction. The majority of these have been crime/thrillers (which isn’t surprising considering Serpent’s Tail’s history and current list). Immediately after we changed our policy, crime made up the majority of fiction submissions, but lately, we’ve had in increase in other genres:
– YA/Children: this has seen the biggest jump. It went from a very small number to around 10%. Unfortunately for these authors, we don’t publish YA or Children’s books and these receive automatic rejections.
– Women’s fiction: A fair amount of it verges on Romance without going full bodice-ripping Mills & Boon. We don’t publish Romance either.
– Short stories: We get quite a few of these. Most of them come from one very keen writer who sends around 3 or 4 stories per week. I have not included his submissions in the above count (doing so would push the total well over 900). We don’t publish short stories in isolation and the collections we do publish are usually collected works of already established authors.
– eXPeriMENTal fiction: Stories told from the point of view of a cup of milk, or a suicidal shoe, or told in a non-linear format using alternating fonts and colour schemes. We do publish this type of thing occasionally. But it has to be amazing and your font/colour scheme combinations should avoid inducing migraines in your readers.
– White-person-travels-to-foreign-lands-and-Learns-Something-from-Enlightened-Natives: Do we need to explain why most of these get a hard pass?
Non-fiction submissions have dropped off hugely over the last 6 months. They previously comprised around 30% of all submissions, but now hover around 15%. We used to get a lot of queries for Economic and Environmental topics, but these have dropped off in favour of the below:
– Examinations of American politics: most of them to do with Trump
– Memoirs: We publish a few memoirs, but very few.
– Music History: We’d actually like more of this.
We’ve also noticed a growing trend for non-fiction writers to look for interest from publishers before they have written the book. We get quite a few emails from people asking if we would be interested in a non-fiction book on ‘X’ that they are planning to write, we send the submission guidelines and never hear back because they’ve gone off to research and write the book. This isn’t necessarily bad, but keep in mind that if it’s a hot topic, we might receive similar, completed manuscripts in the meantime. Best to wait to query until you’ve actually written something.
Follow @AliaMcK on Twitter